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there are a few new things I want to try out for 2014: (in no particular order)

Circus arts classes – I tried a couple of classes out this year and enjoyed them. I would like to dedicate at least one solid term to circus arts

Trampoline sessions – I’ve wanted to try out some freestyle trampoline sessions for a few years and keep on putting it off. So i figured next year, I should just make it happen

Sew something – all i know is how to sew a button onto my clothes, and it’s not even that tidy. I’d like to learn how to make something, anything.

Woodwork – I am crap at anything that is at all design like and I would like to try and make something practical. So I’d like to explore options to either teach myself or take a class and learn how to make something out of wood.

Learn a language with my husband. The default would be to do french, because I know elementary school french and I love the language. Biggest flaw in this plan, is that I haven’t even talked about it with my husband yet.

random ideas that have just popped up:

learn to sing

learn to draw

I have to refer back to this post by the end of January and come up with a plan to make this happen and see how realistic it is to take on so many new things. Maybe 2014 is about exploring the options and map out how to make it happen.

I turned an age that felt like a shoulder shrug to me, some years feel more exciting than others. My sister asked me how I felt about it and that was how I described it. I really liked her response. She basically told me the focus isn’t on the number, however it’s a day to remember to enjoy and feel happy about.

It got me thinking, because I think she thought I was bummed about my birthday, and I think she thought I was shoulder shrugging my birthday, but that was so not the case.

We had a good chat about it and I think she understood what I meant. That the day itself would still be an awesome day but the age I turned was a shoulder shrug.

I didn’t realise I had been creating my own traditions (all of two but still, they count) surrounding my birthday until this year, and I thought I would share what they are.

1. More important than New Year’s, my birthday is where I start to benchmark my year from. Like others, I reflect on the year that’s passed, but I start to think about what I want to achieve in the year ahead. I start setting out what it is that I want to accomplish.

2. I like to try out new things on my birthday. It doesn’t matter what it is, it could be as simple as taking a different route from point A to B, trying a food I haven’t tried before, exploring somewhere I haven’t been or try an activity that I’ve not tried before. The point is there needs to be something new.

3. I like to think that how you spend your birthday is a reflection of how you will spend the year. Be dramatic about it.. it’ll be a dramatic year; fill it with laughter, and you’ll probably have a super fun-filled year. It’s completely unscientific, however its just a bit of birthday fun.

My first foray into blogging and I decided to do 30 blogs in 30 days and the first notification I saw from wordpress was to participate in NaBloPoMo, so I did. I signed up through BlogHer.

Best part about NaBloPoMo has been my favourite mistake. I didn’t know anything about tagging posts, but I did know about hashtagging tweets (you can see where I’m going with this). So I hashtagged my first tag, #NaBloPoMo, and quickly realized that was not the way to do it. Well it has taken me until today, to figure out how to fix my awesome faux-pas.

I was incredibly frustrated with myself when I first realized what I had done, and started giving myself hard a time about it. But as the days went on, I told myself, keep tagging as it is, and when you have a minute try and figure out how to fix it, after that. It was good to remind myself to be patient, since then every time I tagged it incorrectly, it just made me smile and this is why I started the blog, to make mistakes and to learn.

I’ve updated all my posts with the correct tag now, and I’m extremely satisfied that I finally figured it out. Now to tackle the next pressing issue, how to add the badge to my blog. It looked simple enough, but I just don’t know how to do it. I’m still trying to figure my way around wordpress, if anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears.

This is how I feel navigating the whole blog thing, I may not know how to do it all that well, but I’ll enjoy myself for the month.

30 posts in 30 days is harder than I thought. I decided on Nov 1st to try blogging so 30 posts in 30 days is what it was. Usually 30 days is a good round number for me. I reckon trying something on for 30 days is the way to go. You figure out if you like something, if its a novelty, you push through as you hit a wall, come out the other side and you’ve likely learned something. By the time day 30 hits, I take a three day break. This is key for me. It’s during that time, that I know if I’ll maintain whatever it is that I’ve tried. It’s a three day hiatus, for me to decide if I want to make it part of my lifestyle, or if it was just good enough to have tried it. Just long enough to miss it, but just short enough that I don’t slip out of the habit.

I tried a 30 day yoga challenge in 2012, and enjoyed it so much that when a friend of mine decided to do one just one day before i finished mine, i joined her. Doing the challenge was a revelation for me, and that was part of the turning point in realising that yoga was going to become a lifestyle change more than exercise.

I needed to clean up my language, so I tried 30 days without swearing. That. was. impossible. I failed almost daily, but I did cut down a heck of a lot. That challenge taught me that sometimes I should be more realistic with the parameters I set around a challenge. Maybe I should have just aimed to cut down on the swears.

30 day challenges for me, are a source of fun, and a good way for me to try and accomplish something.